I guess in Podbot_mm should be the same trick but nice that you have found it. Actually now by looking at it it looks pretty simple. If you cannot get the light level of FakeClient just attach a hidden entity to him and done.

I looked but it looks like Podbot_mm gets the world model and then uses structures from com_model.h to get the lighting - I couldn't see mechgibs.mdl though I only looked in the obvious places.
Oddly the hidden entity method didn't work when I tried it...